Are There Happy Endings?
by BrokenKestral
Summary: As Arthur rises, fights, and dies again and again, Merlin wonders if there will ever be any happy endings.


**A/N: this story is based on the idea that Merlin is immortal, living out the centuries as they pass, but the others of Camelot aren't. Instead they are repeatedly called back into the world to deal with threats. I've watched one season of **_**Merlin**_**, so it quite obviously isn't mine, but I hope I got the characters right.**

**Beta'd by trustingHim17, who was kind enough to beta something for a different world. **

Morgana asked him the question the second time around.

_Do you believe in happy endings?_

He'd answered it with a firm _yes_ that time.

That time, before he'd held a dying Arthur again.

Again. And again this third time.

World War III, _World War Magic,_ was over, and Britain (the UK, they called it now), Mexico, and Honolulu were victorious. The news holograms were proclaiming victory all over the battlefield. But there were more holograms than living soldiers. Holograms that stood above the earth where Arthur was lying.

Arthur, coughing, choking, face twisted, trying to breath.

Magic had liked the gas attacks from the other World War. They'd refined the substance, giving it a malicious intelligence, and a thin layer of it had wrapped itself around the tube of Arthur's mask. Waiting till he lifted it.

They'd named the gas _Mordred._ After the teenager who'd given up his human body to control it.

And Merlin hadn't seen it till too late.

_Not this time. Not this time. Please, not this time._

Arthur fought. Of _course_ he fought, the idiot, he was _Arthur_ and couldn't _not_ fight things like this, but it wasn't helping. Merlin clutched him, eyes glowing gold, helplessly trying, trying, trying, but Modred had been a scientist this time round as well as druid, and Merlin wasn't, and he couldn't fight both at once, and _Arthur, please_.

Arthur couldn't, and neither could Merlin.

* * *

Merlin stood at the decorated grave. It was barely six feet long, but more land than most of the dead were spared.

"I'm alone again," he told the grave. "You prat," he added, trying to lighten the moment. "I bet you and Gwen had a nice, happy reunion in Avalon yesterday." His fake smile faded. He waited, but the dead said nothing.

They never, ever did.

"I'll see you in a few hundred years. And spend a few more getting you to remember, because you never make it easy." A few hundred years. A few hundred years where his best friend was well-decorated marker for the dead. He turned and left.

_Why is it only the dead get happy endings?_

* * *

The fourth time. Not a World War, but an outbreak of a plague. Merlin had started looking for Arthur as soon as he found out a Druid (somehow that was an official title now, but _Warlock_ wasn't) had accidentally created a plague that could wipe out nine-tenths of humanity.

He didn't find Arthur. He did find the Druid right at the place where Camelot used to be, and it was a scarred, hobbling, limping Mordred. A Mordred who happily married while very young, and had been seeking a cure for the disease killing his wife.

A Mordred who would wipe out the world by _accident_. Merlin threw up his hands, ranted, and started helping Mordred find the cure.

They didn't find it. Arthur did. Arthur, who'd been quarantined with the diseased, who'd broken out with a group of men when he'd heard about what was needed for the cure. (All the men were dead, but from Arthur's descriptions over the communicator, Merlin knew they'd been the Knights). Arthur, who was dying of the disease, but who wanted to get the cure to Mordred's lab _Camelot_.

Merlin got there just in time to watch him die.

Merlin got the cure back to Mordred and wished he could die himself.

He watched Mordred die instead, having cured half the world's disease with the help of another brilliant scientist named Morgana and with Merlin's magic.

_Arthur gets a heroic ending. Mordred gets a peaceful one._

_I don't get any type of ending. I wish I did_.

* * *

Merlin lived five hundred more years. He watched nations rise and fall. He watched ordinary people get caught in the fall, or swept away in the rise. Rarely did they die content; never did they die with everything they'd ever wished for.

_There aren't any happy endings_.

Gwaine came back first this time. Merlin found him as he watched a broadcast of a man testing out the newest technology that allowed him to stand on the surface of the sun.

It didn't work. Merlin found Gwaine just in time to watch him die.

He pressed the leaf-sized memorial that made Gwaine's breathing, solid-feeling replica spring to life in a pose that caught the wicked grin. He released it a moment later, and Gwaine was gone.

_I don't believe in happy endings. _

The others came back still. Gwen was needed the most this time, for her ability to communicate with the newly discovered aliens. (Via mandrake roots. Because that was what they came for.) Arthur was her bodyguard, and one of the few humans the Mandragora trusted.

Only a group of magi-usen (magic-users, Merlin _hated_ how vocabulary changed sometimes) claimed they could read the Mandragoras' minds and that the Mandragora weren't to be trusted.

Arthur, Gwen, and the Mandragora burned in a fireball as bright as the sun.

Gwaine had been the first.

_Happiness exists in fragments. And never, ever at the end_.

* * *

Merlin stopped caring.

Forget that, Merlin tried to stop caring. Merlin couldn't, however, _not care_, so Merlin hid away from everybody. A tiny cottage underwater (one of the few places people weren't living now - Mars was more populated than earth) with a magic air bubble to keep Merlin from constant discomfort. A place no one went. Maybe it would be easier to be alone if that was all he ever expected anymore.

A couple hundred years later, Arthur still found him and told him Merlin was as dead as Arthur had ever been, and to stop sulking, clotpole.

Arthur said it while pulling him into a headlock, and Merlin couldn't bring himself to argue. He and Arthur swam out of the lake to the group of people waiting on shore.

A sword followed after them, bobbing in a singular current.

Arthur grabbed it and grinned, Gwaine laughed, Gwen sighed, and Merlin suddenly found himself caring very, very much.

_It's not an ending. It's another fragment._

_It's still happy._

* * *

They were given twenty years this time. Twenty years that ends when Arthur dies at thirty-five, on a battlefield in the broken-up continent that had once been Asia, shot with guns the size of sewing needles. Gwen dies with him, having learned how to shoot better than any of them.

Gwaine, Percival, Leon, and Lancelot bury them.

Merlin moves them all to his underwater cottage and makes it bigger.

_We're not whole. We're not happy, not without them._

_But Arthur wouldn't call this dead, either._

They die eventually. Merlin's sad but not broken.

He realises this isn't the end. They'll be coming back.

_It's not a story's ending. Just a chapter's. _

He learns to wait.

* * *

Twice more, they come back. Both times, Arthur makes it to his forties.

Somehow, time makes a difference. It makes it easier to wait in-between.

Merlin wonders what he's waiting for.

And when the wait will be over.

_When the story finally ends, when there's no more chapters - will the ending be happy?_

He knows Arthur's answer. Arthur fought for Camelot, and Gwen, and his knights, and his friend, and sometimes for former enemies. And Arthur gets to see them flourish.

Merlin fought for Arthur. If Arthur's happy, does that mean he wins?

It still doesn't feel like it, every time Arthur dies. Every time he's left alone. Every time he was too late, too helpless, too ignorant.

_I'm waiting for the end. There has to be an end._

_But after all this war, I'm frightened of it too._

_Morgana, I don't know if I believe in happy endings._

_But I need to. I can't keep on without that hope._

_When will it end? _

_How will it end?_

* * *

Merlin finds the entire round table group running a rebellion in the tunnels running through the core of the earth.

But they weren't brought back for an uprising. They were brought back because Mar-ssso (the planet named after the god of war, Merlin thinks, and isn't that fitting?) broke into pieces and it's coming to destroy the earth. Merlin's magic and Arthur's strategy aren't enough, but Merlin hunts to find a scientist named Modred who can make the difference. Lancelot finds him just in time, and together they save the world. Again.

But this time it doesn't make a difference. This time the world does end, a year after their victory, to make way for a new earth.

This time, Merlin doesn't have to watch them die. He's with them when the end comes. When the world ends, so does he. And he finds the new earth is a place where all war ceases, and no one dies, and he has an eternity to discover he doesn't get a happy ending.

He gets joy unceasing and life to the full, with everyone he's ever loved.

And it's a story that doesn't have an ending. It's eternity.


End file.
